Apply the 80-20 Rule to your climbing to get the most gains with the least effort

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Completely subjective recommendations for getting the most gains out of the least effort by using Pareto's Principle in your climbing

How To Climb

Vilfredo Pareto, a late 19th Century economist, noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by only 20% of the population. This ratio, now known as Pareto’s Principle (or simply the 80-20 Rule), can be (over) simplified by saying that, generally speaking, 80% of the results of any given endeavor are created by 20% of the effort.

An example is: 80 percent of a company’s profit comes from 20 percent of its customers. Tim Ferris also loosely adapted this idea to his best-selling book The Four Hour Body, which I only flipped through but find compelling (I got 80% of the gist by only reading 20% of the words!) .

The trick is to know what 20% is doing the work. By applying your focus to that crucial 20 percent, you can optimize your time to get the most bang for your buck.

As a climber with a career, I’m constantly trying to maximize the effort I put into climbing. Recently, I’ve wondered how Pareto’s Principle can apply to my rock climbing? What are those 20% of efforts in climbing that will yield the greatest results?

I spent years just trying to rock climb as best I could, dedicated to the old adage that the best training for rock climbing is rock climbing. Sure, I was doing some things right, but what would my learning curve look like if I’d just been a bit more effective in where I put my effort 10 years ago?

Below I’ve listed my completely anecdotal, unscientific, 100% subjective advice strategies for climbing improvement. For me, these are that 20 percent — the low-hanging fruit. Before I get into them, however, I want to say one thing: This is the least you can do to improve performance – to truly maximize your climbing, the devil is in the next 80%. But for most folks, especially those who have jobs and can’t spend 6 hours a day training and three months a year climbing in Spain, here’s where I think you should put your effort.

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Work the Antagonists

One of the most effective uses of your time is avoiding injury. What this really means is that, instead of doing those last few pitches in the gym, you should put effort into injury prevention.

Get strong shoulders and work on your antagonist muscles — the “push” muscles. Spending 10 minutes to do some antagonist work every day might translate to many extra days, months and potentially years of more effective climbing if you don’t have to deal with injury.

Hangboard

Physiologically, your fingers are almost always the weakest link and are almost certainly your limiting variable. Get them stronger, and the rest of climbing becomes easier. It is actually that simple. Even better, strengthening fingers by working out on a good hangboard doesn’t take a lot of time compared to other climbing sessions. Plus, hangboards are cheap and can be installed just about anywhere. There are plenty of ideas for how to hangboard out there. It’s not rocket science, but it does take know-how and skill.

I use the Rock Climber’s Training Manual protocol because it’s simple to do and reliably effective. The RCTM, as well as lots of other training sources, gets into much detail about long-term periodization training. This stuff is great, but it requires a lot more commitment of focus and time, and it varies significantly depending on what kind of climbing you want to do.